In this study we investigate the experiences of participating undergraduate students, graduate students, 4-H and other out-of-school educators’ experiences in science PD workshops that center on equitable science teaching. Specifically, a graduate research assistant and I plan to evaluate the science PD workshops that we will design by collecting all artifacts created or used by participant educators during these experiences. These detailed records of participants’ experiences will help us develop a detailed picture of their learning throughout their engagement, particularly as they aim to make their science pedagogy more equitable. This study will focus primarily on the activities and assessments that are endemic to the workshop, as well as interviews at the start and end of the course. Additionally, we will follow these undergraduate students, graduate students, and other out-of-school educators into their corresponding sites to understand how their pedagogy supports youth’s science learning. It is important to highlight that, while the grand majority of the potential data will be produced during the implementation of the PD workshop, we will also collect other forms of data such as video recordings of their teaching.
Here I describe the kinds of activities that we will design for the PD workshop and the kinds of data they are likely to generate:
1.Context and Participants:
We will design and provide science PD workshops for undergraduate students, graduate students, , 4-H and other out-of-school educators who are interested are required to work with under-served youths in under-served communities. We will recruit participants widely, focusing our efforts on undergraduate students in STEM and/or education majors, as well as graduate students and past 4-H educators who are interested in furthering their professional development.
2. Professional Development Workshop for Participants:
We will develop an educator PD workshop on equitable science pedagogy prior to the after-school programs. Our approach is guided by a situative perspective on teacher learning (Putnam & Borko, 2000), which emphasizes that learning is social, situated in learning contexts, distributed across individuals and artifacts, and life-long. As educators develop and implement learning activities, they draw on multiple resources, including assumptions about youth and how they learn, pedagogies they have experienced and/or enacted, and curriculum materials (Horn & Little, 2010). Moreover, a situated perspective recognizes that educators are constantly learning and refining their teaching practice throughout their careers, which is why it is important to support their professional learning at all stages through activities that match their needs and expertise. Our PD workshops will primarily focus on the representation and decomposition of teaching practices (Grossman et al., 2009), paying particular attention to how participating undergraduate students, graduate students, , 4-H and other out-of-school educators: describe and frame problems of practice; attend to experienced teachers’ practice and incorporate productive elements into their pedagogy; and describe their dispositions towards supporting minoritized youth learn science.
During each PD session, participants will be introduced to asset-based pedagogies for supporting youth learning about the natural world through engaging in science practices. Specifically, the workshop will be guided by the Ambitious Science Teaching Practices framework (Windschitl, Thompson, Braaten, 2020) for developing pedagogies that center meaningful investigations of phenomena, as well as strategies for orchestrating discussions that help youth refine their evidence-based explanatory models. Moreover, participants will reflect on and implement justice-oriented high-leverage teaching practices for making STEM education more equitable and meaningful for youth from under-served communities (Calabrese Barton et al., 2020), such as recognizing how community perspectives should inform science investigations and learning. Finally, the workshop will support participants in developing skills for creating and refining an equitable science curriculum that prioritizes outcomes for youth related to scientific practices, content, identity, agency, and reasoning (NASEM, 2018).
3. Data Collection and Analysis:
To investigate the impact of the professional development workshop on the equitable pedagogy of participating undergraduate students, graduate students, , 4-H and other out-of-school educators we will collect data from five different streams. First, we will conduct 45-minute semi-structured interviews with participants at the beginning of the PD and at the end of their teaching assignments, which will be videotaped. These in-depth interviews will be guided by an ethnographic approach grounded in methodological traditions from educational research, and will ask participants about topics like their (prior) experience with teaching, their understandings of equitable science teaching, the perceived benefits to themselves of participating in the program, and the challenges they expect and/or experienced, among others. The interviews will be analyzed using qualitative open coding and patterns of thinking related to equitable science teaching and learning topics (Miles et al., 2013).
Second, we will video- and audio-record the weekly sessions of the PD workshops and transcribe the videos. We will analyze engagement, discourse, and publicly expressed ideas about teaching and learning. We will analyze engagement by qualitatively coding for different types of verbal participation and facial expressions/movements. We will analyze discourse by a more detailed coding of the different types of verbal participation and the context in which participation occurs. Publicly expressed ideas about teaching and learning will be analyzed through an open coding process to look for patterns in how participants think about equitable science teaching and learning during the workshop.
Third, we will collect artifacts created by participating undergraduate students, graduate students, and other out-of-school educators during the weekly sessions, such as lesson plans and reflection essays. These will be important for recording and cataloguing how the participants unpack and apply the concepts explored throughout the workshop. We will analyze these artifacts through a qualitative open coding process to identify patterns and changes in how participants apply principles (or not) of equitable science education at different parts of the workshop.
Fourth, we will ask graduate students to complete surveys about the quality and impact of the workshop. These surveys will be given at the end of the workshop to gain additional insight into participants’ perceptions about their experiences. Course surveys will be deidentified, so we will analyze these data in the aggregate, looking for overall trends about the kinds of activities that participants find useful, what their main takeaways are, and what aspects of the content and practice they struggle with.
Finally, we will observe and videotape participants at during their teaching assignments, which might include science lessons and/or planning time and/or conversations with other educators. Participating educators will be able to schedule these observations at their convenience with the researcher completing the observation. We will analyze engagement in science classrooms is by using the equitable science talk learning community framework, which looks at the questioning, explaining scientific thinking, source of science ideas, and responsibility for learning for both student and teacher actions. Specific teaching practices will be identified and analyzed (e.g., responding to youths’ thinking, connecting to youths’ lives) through open coding.
